The Conquerors

For the life of me, I cannot understand the motives of the people who stoop to conquer. What’s the appeal? What do they get out of depleting, debasing, or demeaning other people? Do they truly believe that this makes them greater? Do they really think that they can destroy the very people who can offer them the strengths that they need to achieve the excellence they crave and still achieve that excellence?

Wisdom Check – Half of three is more than all of one.

These past few weeks our nation has been faced with the dilemma of whether, and if so, how, to intercede in the civil war in Syria. Assad has taken the role of conqueror to the extreme by murdering the very people from who he derives his power. He’s become just another despot who has deceived himself into believing that Jefferson’s least quoted self-evident truth - that the governors rule at the behest of the governed - doesn’t apply to him. No matter how often we see this proven in history, another conqueror rises up only to crash on the rocks of the ultimate power of the community.

Assad’s crimes have risen to international proportions because he has resorted to the use of weapons of mass destruction, poisoned gas. How can the other nations of the world allow a sister community to be subjected to this murderous behavior? Justice demands that the world intercede or risk having another despot pop up and do the same thing. Therefore we can’t let Assad act with impunity. But no one wants war. War is an extreme, horrific political tool that damages everyone involved not unlike chemotherapy’s effect on the non-cancerous parts of the body. But the proposed limited strike on Assad’s ability to use weapons of mass destruction is necessary, appropriate, and within what, I feel, is justifiable action.

Humanity can’t afford to allow military action to exist on any other level. The stakes have risen to the point where the pointless things, such as war for conquest of a historical enemy, war for the control of natural resources, or war for economic dominance, must be given a new context. It seems to me that war may be devolving into something that is, thankfully, only used to limit the conquerors, tyrants, and despots of the world. I say thankfully for these are the people who deplete too much of the resources which we will need to save us from extinction.

We humans are a race that is racing to self-destruction. We represent an ever-growing taxation on the Earth’s ability to sustain our lives. So far our technological advances have provided enough efficiencies to allow us to grow to a burdensome six billion energy burning, food consuming, air polluting beings. How soon before Mother Earth runs out of milk? What will our technology do for us then?

Humanity needs to grow beyond what we have been to date if we are ever going to be able to handle the tests Nature has in store for us. For the kind of growth this involves we will need to develop more human Excellence. But the necessary Excellence must be of a different character. Since we need communities to produce Excellence we now require communities of a different character.

All of the Earth-bound human communities have become so intertwined that we need all of them pulling on their Excellence oars as a team if we are to survive as a species. In the world of today,the career with the most precarious future is monarch. Political leaders all around the globe are seeing their populations tolerate less and less autocracy. Growing is the intolerance of the injustices that have previously been weighed upon women, minorities, and conquered peoples. In essence, we are emerging from our history of conquest, mercantilism, colonization, slave-holding, monopolization, corporate greed, political corruption, etc. into a population bent on achieving a more global Excellence. At least I see enough signs to hope this is true.

The citizens of Syria seek to follow the citizens of Algeria, Egypt, and Libya, who followed past nations such as all of those in South America, China and India in throwing off the tyranny of their conquerors and choosing their own governments. This is especially true of the United States of America. Please remember we Americans created the path and the justification for disposing of tyrannical rulers. We, of all nations, should stand tallest in defense of the rights of citizens to elect their own democratic governments just as we did in 1776.

In reality, Obama didn’t draw a line in the sand; Jefferson did when he listed those self-evident truths that are still the backbone of our own democracy:
• All of us are created equal.
• We are endowed with unalienable rights that include life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
• We form governments to secure those rights.
• Those governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.
• When their government becomes destructive of those ends, the people have the Right to abolish it. It is the people’s right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and provide New Guards for their future security.

With all that is happening globally in the political, economic, and societal levels, I sense that we need a new statement of the human mind, as Adams might have put it. A worldwide Declaration of Interdependence that expands our application of these unalienable rights and duties to all of humanity. All nations, working in conjunction, have the right, the duty to throw off governments that are destructive to securing our human rights and instituting New Guards of OUR future security. All nations have the responsibility to stand up for any population whose unalienable rights have been destroyed by their own governments.

Our very survival as a race requires it. There is but one earth to support our growing population. It ignores our demarcations, our interactions, and our diatribe. It is only truly concerned with our consumption. It is we humans who give meaning to it all. It is we humans who have to see where our current path leads. It is we humans who must take responsibility for our interdependent future and work to secure where all this will end up. The logarithmic growth of our consumption of Mother Earth’s milk is accelerating our fall to our moment of truth. We will come to a day when it is do or die.

We have no time for conquerors